Life and Times: Bob Dylan in Swansea (2025)

The Life and Times column from the December 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

I’ve been a Bob Dylan fan for a long time. His music is top of my list, as it is of many people’s. I’ve seen him perform live a number of times – in London, Manchester, Cardiff and Birmingham. So why wasn’t I jumping for joy when my local newspaper carried the story that the 84-year old legend was soon to do three concerts (not one but three) in my own little home town – and at a venue a walking distance from where I live? In fact, not only was I not jumping for joy, I didn’t even want to go. Why not? Well, because, as I see it, Dylan has been going downhill musically for a long time – since the late 1990s in fact. The bits and pieces of some of the recent live performances by him I’ve seen on the web have seemed especially dire. So why would I risk spoiling the fond memories I had of him at his best? Don’t get me wrong. He’s still one hell of a wordsmith and, though there was much questioning of his award of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016, I was less surprised than many. But my perception was that the current package couldn’t be anything but a disappointment – even if the many confirmed ‘bobcats’ attending wouldn’t see it like that.

I relayed news of the concerts to my son, a great Dylan enthusiast too. His quick reply was ‘We’re going and I’ll pay’. So I relented, and on an evening in early November we left the house and walked the relatively short distance along the sea front to see the first concert of the Swansea Arena leg of Dylan’s ‘Rough and Rowdy Ways’ tour.

What was it like? To be frank, better than I expected. ‘Mixed’ might be the right word – and in more senses than one. Firstly, because he mixed songs from his most recent album (ie ‘Rough and Rowdy Ways’) with a selection from previous albums. Secondly because most of the songs he performed from that latest album could, in my view, only be described as dirge-like (and to make it worse some of them seeming to go on forever), while his earlier numbers were well performed on the whole, even if with almost unrecognisable arrangements compared to the original versions. But then Dylan has always been known for going against the grain, despite the fact that, in the content of his songs, any explicitly anti-establishment or ‘protest’ matter is way back in the past. And it must be said that his voice is still strong and that he was, as always in his concerts, backed by a group of exceptionally good musicians. The other thing is that the sell-out audience of 3,000 – to me a surprisingly diverse gathering in terms of age (teenagers to aged hippies) and gender (very much a 50-50 split) – absolutely loved it. ‘What an amazing evening’, one of them who’d come all the way from West Yorkshire posted on a Facebook page the following day. And a good many others had clearly come from afar. Before the start, on our row alone, we chatted with fans from Wrexham, Plymouth, Bristol and Milford Haven. Then at 8 o’clock sharp Dylan and his band walked on, the music started and, after performing for a full two hours, with no breaks or banter between songs, they stood up and walked off. The crowd stood up too and clapped and cheered and shouted for more. But they didn’t get it and the lights came on.

The show over, the question I had to ask myself was whether this, at bottom, was just another example of the way the entertainment industry sells us thrills (often meaningless) to patch over the uniformity and stress of the wage and salary system most of us are compelled to spend our lives in? Was it part of that alienation from mutually cooperative activity which is inherently an obsession with celebrities (people we do not know personally and we may have little in common with) and which is the direct opposite of a constructive use of the power and potential we all have to think and create for ourselves and to work usefully and collaboratively with others?

There’s no doubt that Dylan is some kind of hero to many of those who go to his concerts. And it must be said that he has something unique to offer that makes people listen to him and want to go. Many of his lyrics present ideas and images which, while often anything but immediately decipherable and sometimes downright puzzling, do at least give food for thought and reflection. But it’s the worship of the man rather than of his work that, like celebrity worship in general, I see as questionable and as a symptom of the underlying follow-your-leader mentality that capitalism instils and educates people for. You can like (or love) the music and the lyrics, yes. But to put the individual who produces it on some kind of rarified pedestal seems to me part of that ‘superior being’ idea, which is seen at its worst in the kind of cult worship to be found around ‘charismatic’ figures, whether in entertainment, in sport or in politics.

What’s for certain, however, is that in the kind of world socialists campaign to see established – one without leaders or led, governments or governed and based on common ownership of resources and democratic organisation and decision making – each individual will have the time and space to cultivate their own talents freely and, while no doubt admiring the talents and achievements of others, will be unlikely to see them as heroes. Rather in fact each person will have the confidence to be their own hero.

Howard Moss

Gerry-built (2025)

Book Review from the March 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Party is Always Right. By Aidan Beatty. Pluto Press. 2024.

This is sub-titled the ‘Untold Story of Gerry Healy and British Trotskyism’ though in truth most of it has been told before. The interesting addition is the number of interviews that have helped to add colour and richness to a grim story of political failure and an even grimmer tale of internal strife and abuse.

Alongside Ted Grant of the Militant Tendency and Tony Cliff of the Socialist Workers Party, Gerry Healy was one of the three gurus of the British Trotskyist movement. While all three led organisations that had authoritarian tendencies, Healy’s outfit was by far the worst. Called the Socialist Labour League until it changed its name to the Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP) in 1973, it became a byword for cult-like sectarianism and was infused with a rancid, hierarchical political culture which was framed and dominated by the leader himself. Healy was a tyrannical bully who often directed and oversaw violence against his political opponents (both inside and outside the party) and who was an expert manipulator. Indeed, that was arguably his main ‘talent’ such as it was and what kept him at the top of the organisation for so long.

Unlike Grant or Cliff, Healy was no theoretician with a knowledge of Marx, even though he liked to paint himself as such. Most of his attempts at establishing this sort of reputation for himself only served to expose his limitations, which were considerable. He was obsessed with Marxist dialectics, but his forays into this were generally just nonsense (Beatty quotes a few examples in case anyone was in any doubt).

Healy also seemed to possess relatively little knowledge of Marxist economics. He was the perennial catastrophist, constantly predicting that capitalism was in its final death agony and that the revolution was imminent. He was effectively saying the same thing in the 1970s and 80s as he had been in the 1950s. Yet the collapse never came.

Some argue that he had a certain charisma, which is why he was able to keep his hold on the party for so long. It was certainly enough to woo a number of high-profile celebrities into the orbit of the organisation, starting with the actor Corin Redgrave and then his more famous sister Vanessa, but including many others from Frances De La Tour to former Spurs football player Chris Hughton.

But this charisma – if that is what it was – was ultimately to prove the downfall of both Healy and the WRP. In 1985, Healy’s secretary Aileen Jennings wrote to the Political Committee of the WRP alleging that Healy was a serial manipulator and sexual abuser of women, naming 26 female victims, mainly party members. This eventually led to a predictable slew of lurid tabloid headlines and was a proverbial ‘hand grenade’ against its supreme leader from which the WRP never recovered. It split into myriad warring factions over the following years.

Healy himself then founded the Marxist Party with loyalists Vanessa and Corin Redgrave but died aged 76 in 1989 and this party – never more than about 50 or so – dwindled away to nothing. The surviving WRP led by Sheila Torrance is also now tiny (estimated at around 120 members at most) though still stands General Election candidates, as periodically does another small surviving faction, now called the Socialist Equality Party and linked to a US organisation of the same name led by David North (a Healy protégé).

At its peak the WRP may have had 3,000 members but when the split happened the party’s finances became one of the biggest bones of contention as it emerged that many of its assets were not actually registered in the name of the party itself, but through other byzantine and opaque structures – allegedly for security reasons. There was a Head Office (with no signage) on Clapham High Street in a building now occupied by Caffé Nero, eight apartments around the corner in Clapham Old Town (Healy himself lived in one of them), a ‘College of Marxist Education’ in rural Derbyshire, and a state-of-the-art printing works in Runcorn that had enabled the WRP to produce the first colour daily newspaper in Britain, News Line. There were also several ‘Youth Training Centres’ it had set up, at one stage several bookshops, and also fleets of vehicles including Healy’s BMW.

The party’s finances were actually another Achilles Heel, as it over-extended itself in a way that couldn’t be sustained through membership income and paper sales alone, however hard the leadership pushed the members and gave them impossible targets to meet. Hence Healy’s well-known soliciting of money from Iraq and – in particular – Colonel Gaddafi’s Libyan regime (which also gave the WRP printing works considerable contracts, including for mass copies of the Green Book). Beatty is sceptical of some of the wilder claims that have been made about links with Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein and the PLO as well, but there is little doubt that money came from both Iraq and Libya and was not unconnected with the virulently pro-Arab nationalist tone of much WRP literature.

This then leads us on to another theme – the paranoia and secrecy at the heart of the organisation. Healy was obsessed with the security services, spies and moles, and saw them everywhere. Anyone who crossed him was lucky to be called a ‘subjectivist idealist’ or similar, the alternative was that they were really a spy. Anecdotes about speakers at WRP meetings being asked to speak with their backs to the window (in case MI5 listening devices could pick up sensitive vibrations from the glass) were not entirely unfounded. In fact, the British state did show an interest in the WRP (especially in the 70s and 80s) though this was more because of its links to industrial disruption in the early 70s and then later links to foreign governments and their money, than any assessment of them being a credible domestic revolutionary threat.

Beatty says that the standard description of the WRP as a cult has something going for it, but is, of itself, inadequate because its internal practices were directly a product of its elitist political outlook:

‘Dismissing the WRP as a cult means ignoring the connection between the WRP’s authoritarian culture and the party’s Leninist structure. The WRP can and should be understood also as an extreme manifestation of Leninist vanguardism and its anti-democratic praxis’ (p. xvii).

We could not have put it better ourselves.

Dave Perrin

Material World: Socialist ideas on the Internet (2025)

The Material World column from the February 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

As we all know, the internet has virtues and vices. One of its virtues is that it allows ideas and information to be exchanged among people, often in different parts of the world, with an ease that would have been impossible in pre-internet days. So we, in the Socialist Party, can more readily than ever find out about other individuals or organisations who have come to similar conclusions to ours and share, or are close to sharing, our views on the system we live in and the need to replace it with a different kind of system. We are talking here about a society of free and equal access to all goods and services with no buying and selling or wages and salaries and with the technology and the abundant resources of the planet used to satisfy needs and not for profit-making ends. An example of such like-mindedness is to be found on the Facebook site called ‘A Group Where We Are All Active Against Capitalism’. It carries its own self-description:

’This group exists to support the abolition of the power of capital through the transformation of the means of production from private to social ownership. This will only be achieved by the working class emancipating ourselves world wide.

The revolutionary reconstitution will also involve the ending of wage labour and all elements of capitalism as the global proletariat (the working class within capitalism) lays the basis for a sustainable future for humanity.

That transition to a socialist/Communist/cooperative world will eliminate all the horrors associated with the Imperialist period including military conflicts and ecological destruction.

The replacement for such barbarism will be a stateless, classless, moneyless society based on free association and production and distribution according to need.

We are open to all individuals and organisations who are in broad agreement with that position. We actively seek to host contributions that are in accord with that position from any source.

For the avoidance of doubt we will not carry posts that support any existing or proposed nation state.

Neither will we carry posts supporting the historic or continuing theory and practice of state capitalist entities such as the Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China or similar regimes.

Forward to an end to capitalism!’

It would be hard to find a closer likeness to our own position and aspirations. And this being the case, one might expect the posts on the site to be largely supportive of its objectives or at least asking honest questions of those. Yet this is by no means always what one finds. Rarely, in fact, do those posts contain clear mention of aspirations like the end of wage labour and ‘stateless, classless and moneyless’ social arrangements.

What is to be found on the whole are the kind of reformist calls for various improvements to what already exists that regularly come from those on the left who (mistakenly in our view) call themselves socialists or communists. So there are plenty of references to, for example, state ownership of industry, more ‘rights’ for workers, laws to favour trade unions, better health care, higher taxes for the rich, etc., etc. Calls, in other words, for more crumbs from the table, for a more benign form of capitalism. And mixed in with them we also often find support for, or defence of, states or regimes within capitalism that are somehow deemed to be ‘progressive’ (eg, Cuba, China, Vietnam). Any posts that challenge this tend to elicit the response that yes, in reality and ideally we want the same thing as you, but that’s likely to be a long way off and we need to improve things as much as possible ‘in the meantime’. So they are deaf to the obvious reality that if you put off the demand for socialism, you continue to put off socialism itself.

Maoist mythology

A prime example was to be found on that site in a recent post entitled ‘Is Maoism Marxist?’ and providing a link to an article written by Steve Leigh from a website called ‘A Marxist View of Current Events’. Leigh, who describes himself as ‘a member of Seattle Revolutionary Socialists and Firebrand, national organization of Marxists, 50 year socialist organizer’, begins by asking ‘What is our relationship to Maoism?’ and ‘What Maoist ideas, if any, have merit?’. He goes on to outline the history of Mao Zedong’s gradual rise to political prominence in China from the late 1920s onwards leading to his eventual takeover in the late 1940s and then authoritarian rule of the country till his death in 1976. Much of what the writer has to say actually makes good sense – for example that Maoism was a form of Stalinism which, via its economic policies, caused ‘widespread famines’ (the ‘Great Leap Forward’) and, in its oppression of those who were not held to be in conformity with Maoist doctrine, practised mass persecution and killings of its supposed enemies (the ‘Cultural Revolution’).

The writer also criticises Mao and Maoism for putting forward the idea that ‘socialism’ can be developed and achieved in a single country and has to be imposed on workers by a revolutionary leadership rather than workers establishing it democratically themselves. But he then goes hopelessly awry in declaring that ‘the Chinese revolution had many positive aspects to it’ (tell that to its millions of victims) and that ‘all of these things are towering historical accomplishments’. Clearly some of the mythology of China under Mao being in some sense positive and having something to do with socialism has stuck with Steve Leigh, as it has with many others on the Left.

The reality is that, rhetoric apart, China under Mao and subsequent regimes have been anti-socialist dictatorships bearing no relation whatever to the society of voluntary cooperation, democratic organisation and economic equality via free access to all goods and services which the Socialist Party stands for and consistently advocates and that the website which gives access to this article declares that it too endorses. So why, one might ask, does such a website, which says it will not carry ‘posts supporting the historic or continuing theory and practice of state capitalist entities such as the Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China or similar regimes’ give a platform to articles like this. Of course, a free exchange of ideas from all sides is entirely desirable, but why carry without any attempt at response ideas or material that do nothing to promote – and indeed even contradict – the aspirations it claims to stand for?

Howard Moss

50 Years Ago: Who is Mao Tse-Tung? (2025)

The 50 Years Ago column from the February 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is the purpose of this article to show what Mao really stands for by examining The Thoughts of Chairman Mao (‘The Little Red Book’). This Chinese Bible contains extracts from Mao’s voluminous writings. There are quotes from his early works written when as a guerrilla leader, Mao (and his Red Army) were such a thorn in the side of the Chiang-Kai-Shek regime, right through to the 1960s. Now Mao’s ideas are so influential in China that they actually do serve as the equivalent of religious dogma. (…)

Mao’s own words show that he is in favour of keeping the Chinese workers in poverty. In 1958 (nine years after the revolution!) he wrote:

‘Apart from their other characteristics, the outstanding thing about China’s 600 million people is that they are ‘poor and blank’. This may seem a bad thing, but in reality it is a good thing‘ (p. 36 — our emphasis).

It must be such a comfort for the poverty-stricken Chinese to know their leader thinks it is good for them to be poor. Mao does not make it clear that he thinks it is good for the leaders to be poor! (…)

In order to ensure that the workers are kept down, Mao can’t resist urging on them abstinence and sacrifice:

‘To make China rich and strong needs several decades of intense effort, which will include, among other things, the effort to practise strict economy and combat waste ie, the policy of building up our country through diligence and frugality’ (p.186).

If those words had been spoken by Wilson or Heath in crisis-ridden Britain you would not have been surprised.

The similarity between Mao and other capitalist politicians is so striking as to make one rub one’s eyes in disbelief at the sight of people in the West waving banners with Mao’s picture on them and proudly calling themselves ‘Maoists’. Mao is just as much an anti-Socialist as his one-time hero Stalin was. They both have in common the fact that they successfully exercised a dictatorship over the proletariat in their own country. When workers throughout the world learn to examine the contents of the packet and refuse just to accept the label, the fraud of Mao Tse-Tung will also be a ‘Museum piece’.

[From the article, 'Who is Mao Tse-Tung?' by Ronnie Warrington, Socialist Standard, February 1975]

Tiny Tips (2024)

The Tiny Tips column from the March 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

World’s 5 Richest Men Have Added $14M to Their Wealth Every Hour Since 2020.

[tinyurl.com/bdh2vxyt]

Green capitalism is a con. Only Marxism can save the planet.

[tinyurl.com/mpdpwp54]

A member of the Chinese Communist Party is the second-largest foreign owner of US land, according to the Daily Caller. Billionaire Chen Tianqiao, founder, chairman and CEO of Shanda Group, owns around 200,000 acres of land in Oregon.

[tinyurl.com/2mztxehy]

…the Deng drive produced a de facto capitalist economy presided by a bureaucratic bourgeoisie: ‘As has been true of the histories of all capitalist economies, the power of the state was very much involved in establishing China’s labor market. Indeed, in China a highly repressive state apparatus played a particularly direct and coercive role in the commodification of labor, a process that has proceeded with a rapidity and on a scale that is historically unprecedented’.

[tinyurl.com/yc44v6sw]

Since gaining power five years ago, the civil-military-religious alliance headed by Nobel Peace Prize winner and Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, has waged two major wars against its citizens.

[tinyurl.com/43tkkrej]

Britain’s chief rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis, spoke… to extol the “outstanding” performance of the Israeli military in Gaza.

[tinyurl.com/yss442ke]

Some of the riches that these countries and companies seek include rare-earth metals and the isotope helium-3, which, while rare on Earth, is abundant on the moon and can theoretically be used to power nuclear fusion reactors.

[tinyurl.com/3j84pnu5]

It can be argued that Lenin only followed a pattern set by the Tsars, whose ruthlessness and autocratic rule had defined and despoiled Russia for centuries. Yet sitting in his seat at the British Museum, Lenin had fancied he could fashion a better, more peaceful, more equal Russia – only for the reality of exercising power in that vast country and his determination to force a reluctant population into line, whatever the cost, to turn him into a tsar in all but name and every bit as terrible as his predecessors.

[tinyurl.com/52b2sf7f]

Life expectancy for a Russian man is only 65. Mr Putin’s regime is trying to turn getting killed into an economically rational choice.

[tinyurl.com/49hfwte2]

In Pretoria… President Cyril Ramaphosa was seen warmly shaking the blood-soaked hand of Hemedti, a one-time leader of the Janjaweed, which holds the dubious distinction of carrying out the first genocide of the 21st century in Darfur.

[tinyurl.com/bdf87ucw]

Homeless rise sees young person become destitute every four minutes, research finds.

[tinyurl.com/nusjjuw3]

The specific piece of equipment, a plug door that broke off a Boeing 737 MAX 9 aircraft during Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 from Portland on Friday night, in fact illustrates many of the broader trends in the airline industry today: the desire to cram more passengers into finite space, the standardization of production across outsourced subcontractors, and the lack of oversight from federal regulators into these increasingly dangerous schemes.

[tinyurl.com/bhsjrwd2]

As MAGA devotion to Donald Trump grows within the evangelical community, once politically powerful religious leaders are losing sway over followers who have convinced themselves that Trump is the new savior.

[tinyurl.com/2p8xesnz]

What! Another Mistake? (1950)

From the February 1950 issue of the Socialist Standard

1. Old.

In the October, 1936, Socialist Standard there appeared an article “The Russian ‘ Terrorist ’ Trial,” dealing with the infamous “Moscow Trials.” It contained extracts from a special number of “International Press Correspondence,” Vol. 16, No. 41, September 9th, 1936—a journal of the late, unlamented “Third International” (“Comintern,” Moscow). The article is contained in the pamphlet "Russia Since 1917” (Socialist Party of Great Britain, 1948, 1s.) from which the following is quoted (pages 59, 60):—

(Vishinsky, prosecutor, cross-examining Holzman):

" 'We drove in a taxi—Holzman continued his deposition—but I do not remember the street. Sedov took me into a flat. It was on the fourth floor. Here I gave him the report and code. ... I met him like this six to eight times in the course of four months. 'In November,' Holzman continued, 'I again 'phoned Sedov, and we met again. Sedov said to me: 'As you are getting ready to go to the U.S.S.R., 1 would advise you to go with me to Copenhagen, where my father is.' "

“Vishinsky: ‘That is?'

“ Holzman: 'That is, Trotsky?'

“Vishinsky: 'You went? ’

“Holzman: "I agreed and told Sedov that in two or three days I would go to him in Copenhagen and stay at the Hotel Bristol, where we could meet. I went straight from the station to the hotel, and met Sedov in the lounge.' (Page 1120)."

The writer of the “ S.S.” article commented:

“ Let us consider this statement.

“ The second paragraph states that Holzman went to a flat with Sedov, but Holzman could not remember the street, although he visited the flat ’six to eight times in the course of four months.' How very curious!

“This paragraph states that they met in 1932 at the Hotel Bristol in Copenhagen. Unfortunately for this statement the diplomatic correspondent of the Manchester Guardian (September 17th, 1936) points out that the Hotel Bristol was pulled down in 1917! Possibly one of those who took part in preparing the case had been in Copenhagen during the war but did not know the dirty trick someone had played in 1917! ”

There is much more in the article quoted from, which throws grave doubts, to say the least, on the reliability of these confessions and the evidence on which conviction is obtained.

2. New.

“. . . Two and a half years ago, ... the Central Committee of the Bulgarian Communist Party passed a resolution of congratulation on the occasion of ... (the) birthday ... of the party’s general secretary.” (Vernon Bartlett, News Chronicle, December 19th, 1949.) 

He continues: —

“ One sentence in it is worthy of repetition: ‘ Your deep Marxist-Leninist knowledge, your great culture, your well-known industry and steadfastness, your modesty, your iron will, your unquestionable loyalty towards the Party and [! ] the working class, are those Bolshevist characteristics which beautify your whole life.’ ” 

This was for Traicho Kostov!

Later, when his Bulgarian Nationalism appeared to be superceding his Russian Nationalism, “Kostovism” became “Titoism on Bulgarian soil,” according to a report from Sofia. (“Titoism” appears to mean Yugoslav Nationalism superceding Russian Nationalism “ on Yugoslav soil.")

The following is quoted from the Evening News December 13th, 1949. If a correct report of proceedings it would indicate an incident similar to the “Hotel Bristol 'mistake'. "

"The Foreign Office said to-day that Mr. 'Billy' Watson, whose name has been mentioned in the treason trial in Sofia of Traicho Kostov and others, was a business man who lived in Sofia. It was alleged that Mr. Watson had contacted Kostav in February, 1948; in fact, he died in January of that year . . ."

Perhaps this is a case where we should add : "Psychic News: please copy ”!

Alec Hart

On Personalities. (1906)

From the July 1906 issue of the Socialist Standard

A standing objection to us and our method of propaganda in press and on platform is that we are too personal. When all other criticism has been reasoned down, we can generally rely that our opponent for the time being will fling at us as the last word in the category of the objectionables—too personal. Generally, also, we get this dialectical missile hurtled at us as our worthy critic hastens without the reach of any reply we may wish to make—which provokes in what I endeavour shall be my exceedingly charitable mind, the thought that the objector is more concerned with scoring a point at our expense than with urging an argument for the sake of truth.

Nevertheless, I am aware that the same objection seriously influences some number of persons to regard us unfavourably, so that it may be worth while to occupy a little space in an enquiry into the validity and the value of the objection.

My endeavour will be to shew, not that we do not use what is called personalities, but that such personal references as we make are entirely unobjectionable and are, indeed, absolutely indispensable to the elucidation of the problems and the discussion of the questions we direct our attention to as a Socialist Party. Not, of course, that the use of personalities is peculiar to a Socialist Party. Every other body of propagandists, from the occupants of professional chairs dilating upon the wonders of a universe, to the denizens of a pot-house dilating upon the virtues of a particular brand of four ale ; from men of the standing of Ernst Haeckel to men of the lying of say, Dr. Torrey, all make the personal appeal, the personal reference, use the personal illustration. Even our friend the anti-personality man commits what he regards as the unpardonable sin in illustrating his objection by personal references to us. There is no subject under high heaven that can be discussed without personalities of one sort or another. We can hardly talk of the law of gravity without reference to Newton and without pointing our remarks upon the operation of the law by the illustration of the unfortunate men who have fallen out of balloons. Nor can we dissociate Darwin from evolution, Marx from the theory of value, Armour and Co. from the recently disclosed horrors of embalmed beef, “Labour” Leaders from political impotency and the cause of working-class confusion and so on. These are all personal references and should be, if our objector’s case is a good one, taboo. Does our objector agree ? So far as the first four cases are concerned probably he does, but he disagrees about the last mentioned. Which means that he is in favor of some personalities sometimes. Then where does he draw his line ? How does he discriminate ?

If I know my honest objector well (as I think I do), his protest is not against the use of personalities at all. It is against the unfair and the unnecessary use of them. And his idea of the unfair and unnecessary personality is that one which for certain reasons is distasteful to him. He is an admirer say of Will Crooks or John Burns. He thinks they are good men who are striving whole-heartedly for the benefit of the working class. And when we lump them together among the crowd of working-class enemies, he is indignant and declaims our use of personalities. But when in our examination of the workings of Capitalism we make denunciatory references to the pork packers of Chicago who are prepared to poison the proletariat for personal profit, he says “hear, hear,” and applauds vociferously.

Now why is this ? It is in the one case because he can appreciate enough of the facts to know that our personal references to Armour and Co. are fair and necessary and serve as a forceful illustration of our argument, while in the other the references are not fair or necessary, because he has not appreciated the facts. Yet we are continually placing on record facts in proof of our arguments against Burns and Crooks, who we hold are poisoning the minds of the proletariat. We make our personal references to them serve as illustrations in just the same way as our personal references to the poisoned pork packers.

Why does not our friend appreciate the facts as much in the one case as in the other ? Because in the case of Crooks or Burns he starts prejudiced in their favour and either will not listen to the facts at all, or dismisses them as personalities. Which simply means that he is in favor only of the personalities of approval so far as they are concerned and is in favor of the personalities of disapproval so far as we are concerned, because he usually stigmatizes us as “personality” purveyors of an objectionable type. But be it observed he approves the use of personalities in any case.

The same thing applies to our references to the I.L.P., the S.D.F. and similar bodies or members of similar bodies. It is frequently urged that we may and should go on our way preaching our gospel, regardless entirely of such men and organisations. But this is just as impossible as the omission of references to the individuals whose names are inextricably intermixed with such subjects as Evolution would be, were we discussing those subjects. As a Socialist Party, we have to face and deal with a doleful mass of working-class ignorance. To do so we have to face and deal with what we regard as contributing factors to working-class ignorance such as the organizations and individuals named. In their case we have the greater incentive because their existence is known of in every district that we can reach in our national propaganda work and we are, therefore, the more urgently called upon to shew cause why we, making for the goal which they too are ostensibly working toward, are yet dissociated from them. Moreover, even if it were possible to drop them from our consideration entirely, we should be discarding the potent illuminating force to be obtained from personal reference. Anything that may be fairly used to illustrate our argument and emphasise our attitude, should be utilised. We should be failing in our duty to our class were we to omit to do so. We should most certainly be voluntarily weakening ourselves as propagandists and to that extent should be defeating our own purposes. Incidentally we should be laying ourselves open also to the charge of cowardice from those who, knowing of the existence of these other bodies, observe that we studiously avoid tackling them.

Very well. The position narrows itself to this : personalities, so far from being objectionable, are proper and necessary, so long as they are fair. A fair personality is one which expresses that which can be substantiated as true. If any objector thinks he has a case against us he must, therefore, shew that our personal references are unfair because they are untrue. If he can find any such and will point them out to us and so prove his objection, we, for our part will be very ready to withdraw and apologise. So far as I am aware, no such unfair reference has been made by members of this Party. If it has, I am quite confident that the Party will immediately repudiate it. We are out to speak the truth as we know it to the end that the working class knowing the truth may organize upon a sound basis and proceed along right lines towards their emancipation.

That is our business. Simply that and nothing more, and if in the process we come full tilt against the words or the deeds of the heroes of our good friend the conscientious objector to personalities, I hope that, before he stultifies himself by launching the personality of opprobrium against us, he will carefully weigh with what of calm, cool dispassionate discrimination he may, the facts and the argument which we adduce in support of our attitude. Then he will be the better able to judge whether we deserve dismissal from his or any other’s consideration. In any case, I am sure a fair attention to this little screed will induce him to regard his objection to the use of personalities with rather less favor than at present.

Agra.

50 Years Ago: Upset in Accra: Dr. Nkrumah upsets his friends (2008)

The 50 Years Ago column from the January 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

In 1951 the Gold Coast legislature for the first time represented all the territory’s inhabitants, voting in secret ballot. The elections of 1951 and 1954 were won by the Convention People’s Party (CPP), whose leader, Dr. Nkrumah was brought from jail to fill the newly-created post of Prime Minister. The CPP stood on a programme of independence from British rule and when they won a third overwhelming victory in the 1956 elections, Whitehall agreed to the inevitable. At midnight on 5th March, 1957, the Gold Coast ceased to exist and the State of Ghana took its place. A new national anthem—Ghana Arise, by Hector Hughes, a British Labour M.P.—was substituted for God Save the Queen. ( . . .)

The first signs that Ghana was going to betray the hopes of its friends came when Dr. Nkrumah appeared to be fostering his own little personality cult, by having his head stamped on the new coinage and going to live in Christiansborg Castle which, as the old residence of Danish and British governors, is heavy with unpleasant memories. Then came the expulsions and a Special Bill to allow Mr. Edusei to deport two men without the right of appeal. The municipal councils of Accra and Kumasi were suspended and so was the chief of the 300,000 Akim Abuakwa tribe. Several members of the opposition were kidnapped and from the other side, a plot to assassinate Dr. Nkrumah was alleged. In this hysterical atmosphere, it seemed. Africa’s immaculate embryo democracy had been born a deformed dictatorship.

The truth of the matter is that last March saw the end of Nkrumah’s days of agitation and faced him with the realities of power over a country which is trying to make its way in the capitalist world. The first reality was a staggering fall in the price of cocoa, so that the first budget was chillingly austere and the Ghanaian workers were told that it would be unpatriotic to ask for higher-wages. They had expected better than this from Nkrumah ; a national transport strike was called and rioting broke out in Accra. Another difficulty is that Nkrumah is struggling to establish government on modern capitalist lines and to stamp out the old system of tribal rule.

(from article by Ivan in Socialist Standard, January 1958)

Trump and lying as a tactic (2020)

From the November 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

The reign of President Trump in the United States has been characterised by open deceit. Many of his opponents berated the media for not calling his lies outright lies, but even when they have, it has not scratched the levels of support he possesses among his millions of followers. A recent example was following the revelations, in the Bob Woodward recorded interviews, that Trump had tried to downplay the seriousness of Covid 19, while knowing full well the danger it posed (as he later found to his cost). His team’s response was to announce that Trump had never played down the seriousness of Covid, despite him – on tape – saying he would and the plethora of public statements that can demonstrate that he did. That does not matter, they are sticking by the lie.

As Gary Kasparov, former Soviet chess grandmaster, has had occasion to point out, the purpose of such lies is not just to deceive, but to prove loyalty by seeing who is willing to swallow their pride and utter deliberate untruths that they know not just to be untruths but unconvincing ones at that. Kasparov had experienced this first hand in the Soviet Union and under Putin. It is an exercise in raw power. It promotes the cult-like following President Trump has whipped up.

Of course this is nothing new. As Marx and Engels wrote in The German Ideology:

‘The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it’.

Those ideas, necessarily, are going to serve that class (and they are by no means homogeneous and uncontested within the ruling class and between contending classes). To the extent that they present the interests of the ruling class as the interests of the whole of society, they are inherently deceitful (but not necessarily consciously so).

This accounts for so much of the noise around Trump: as a billionaire capitalist who surrounds himself with millionaires, centimillionaires and the billionaire Betsy DeVos, and who took the reins of power from the career politicians, he refuses to think and act like a career politician with the sensibility and decorum usually demanded of a candidate or office holder. The Democrats who find Trump uncouth are precisely the technocrats Noam Chomsky warned about in his essay The Responsibility of Intellectuals, who believe that ‘the age of ideology is ended, supplanted, at least in the West, by a general agreement that each issue must be settled in its own terms, within the framework of a Welfare State in which, presumably, experts in the conduct of public affairs will have a prominent role’. (chomsky.info/19670223/).

Those ‘experts’ dominated the Clinton, Blair and Obama governments. As the late David Graeber pointed out, they represented the ‘peculiar fusion of public and private, market forces and administrative oversight, the world of hallmarks, benchmarks, and stakeholders that characterizes what I’ve been calling centrism is a direct expression of the sensibilities of the professional-managerial classes’ (tinyurl.com/rmeyu88). Professional-managerial classes who value procedure over substance, the upshot of which is worth quoting at length:

‘All this also helps explain the otherwise mysterious popular appeal of the disorganized, impulsive, shambolic (but nonetheless cut-to-the-chase, get-things-done) personas cultivated by men like Trump and Johnson. Yes, they are children of privilege in every possible sense of the term. Yes, they are pathological liars. Yes, they don’t seem to care about anyone but themselves. But they also present themselves as the precise opposite of the infuriating administrator whose endless appeal to rules and demand for additional meetings, paperwork, and motivational seminars makes it impossible for you to do your job’.

The anger against the infuriatingly anodyne procedures designed to smother conflict in the workplace and society lies behind much of the willingness to submit to the enthusiastic lies of Trump. Added to this is the conviction that Trump’s Democrat rivals are themselves pathologically dishonest (albeit they prefer more plausible lies).

Some of this stretches back to Trump’s role in ‘birtherism’, the unshakable belief that Barack Obama wasn’t really American enough to be president (despite production of his birth certificate). But it also goes back further to things like 9/11 Truth, and the refusal to believe the ‘official story’.

QAnon

His most fervent acolytes have been found through incidents like the  Pizzagate furore (the belief that high ranking Democrat officials were meeting at a Washington DC pizza restaurant that was a front for human trafficking and paedophilic abuse). It was totally false, but one man decided to take action, and attack the restaurant. There has also been an arson attempt. The man claimed to believe he was freeing the children

This story has since merged with QAnon. Q is a putative member of the Whitehouse staff, leaking the ‘real’ agenda to the Trump administration. It is best summarised by the Wikipedia entry:

‘QAnon is a far-right conspiracy theory alleging that a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles running a global child sex-trafficking ring is plotting against President Donald Trump, who is battling them, leading to a “day of reckoning” involving the mass arrest of journalists and politicians. No part of the theory is based on fact’,

Q posts gnomic comments on various right-wing communities boards, and his followers seek to decode them, believing that Trump is playing a long game against entrenched powerful interests, until the day they will all be arrested and tried. His lies are part of that game against the corrupt officials who infest Washington.

Q followers post on Twitter under the hashtag #WWG1WGA (‘Where we go one, we go all’) as a sort of rallying cry. They also post a lot under #SaveTheChildren. The centrality of the paedophilia claims is curious. Certainly, it is common to impute absolute immorality to opponents. In this instance, partly, it is a method to gain support by finding people who will be upset by the horror of child abuse. It is also likely that this is an imaginary sublimation of the idea that their enemies are taking something precious away from them, and children are the most precious thing most people possess (as well as being metonymically linked with vitality and the future).

Dan Olson, in his YouTube video, In search of flat Earth, puts forward the analysis that the QAnon believers are actually engaged in a form of violence. Their whacky ideas are not about debate but about forcing people to choose sides (firstly by weeding out adherents who don’t buy the theory wholesale, then by closing down debate with anyone who tries to argue with them factually). QAnon is a refusal to see a structural problem, instead believing the system itself is being subverted by infiltration, which must be fought by any means necessary, including outright conscious lying. They want to shut up the critics of the system.

Trump turned himself into a danger to the world by clamping down on US state-sponsored climate science. Lies are a weapon against humanity. They cannot simply be debunked, the antidote is the building of conscious analysis of the way the world really is, and finding a constituency willing to listen to that truth that is bigger and better organised than the QAnon cultists.

Pik Smeet

Yugoslavia today: “Socialist Federal Republic” (1963)

From the September 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

In April this year Yugoslavia declared itself a ‘'Socialist Federal Republic" under a new constitution. The constitution proclaimed the “abolition of wage-labour relations” and declared that the economic system was “based on relations between people acting as free and equal producers and creators, whose work serves exclusively to satisfy their personal and common needs." The constitution contains the usual Stalinist distortions of Marxism, namely, the allegedly Socialist slogan “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his work " as the principle of distribution, the false division between Socialism and Communism, the continued existence of buying and selling under “Socialism” and finally, the League of Communists, the name of the Yugoslav Communist Party since 1957, as the “prime mover” in the construction of Socialism. Marxists, however, do not judge a country by its formal constitution. On the contrary they examine the actual social relations obtaining in that country. Such an examination of Yugoslav society exposes the hollowness of its Socialist pretensions and reveals that capitalism continues to flourish there.

Yugoslavia is a totalitarian state. Most of the people are in the mass organisations typical of such states—in Yugoslavia the Socialist Alliance and the People’s Youth. Marshal Tito appears as a very important person. Youth brigades sing songs to Tito i Partija and his picture adorns the wall of every shop and public place. Still it would be going too' far to label him as a personal dictator. Power in Yugoslavia is in the hands of a small clique (which performs the functions of a capitalist class) of which Tito is just one member.

Nor would it be fair to say that there is widespread opposition to the regime. Certainly in peasant areas people can be found who are against the government. This is hardly surprising since the expressed intention of the government is to modernise the country and to sweep aside out-dated institutions and ideas.

Yugoslavia is a popular dictatorship, that is, a dictatorship enjoying the support of most of the people. In recent years, however, the Yugoslav rulers have learned the lesson which the ruling classes of the developed countries learned long ago: that in order to run the State efficiently so that exploitation can continue in peace the procedure of government must be such that the opinions of the people can be heard and taken into account. Accordingly we find talk about developing "Socialist democracy” and “social self-management.” This is not all talk. People really are being allowed to take part in the running of the administration. But there’s nothing Socialist about it. Yugoslavia’s “Socialist” democracy is something less than the non-party local government which exists in the less industrialised parts of this country. Circumstances are compelling the Yugoslav rulers to democratise their government. But the emergence of the limited political democracy that prevails in the more developed countries of Europe is still a long way off.

What has happened in Yugoslavia is a world-wide phenomenon. Throughout the world totalitarian state capitalism is the form under which many of the backward areas are developing. This is because in these countries the native bourgeoisie is so weak that the state has to take over their traditional role, which is the accumulation of capital. This type of state is in fact more capitalist than the capitalists themselves. Those in charge know where they wish to go and use the state machine consciously to destroy the old society and its ideas and to spread capitalist relations as rapidly as possible throughout the area under their control. Needless to say they do not put it in this way and so we have a varied collection of “Socialisms” throughout the world ranging from “royal” Socialism to allegedly Marxist Socialism. Yugoslavia is one of these countries.

Socialists have never denied the role which capitalism plays in economic development. We have always said that the role of capitalism is to develop the means of production to the point when Socialism and production for use become possible. On a world scale capitalism has long since done this; from this point of view it is now a reactionary social system standing in the way of social progress. Nevertheless, in backward countries it continues to play this role. It removes thousands from the limitations of rural life, educating them and preparing them for life in industrial society. All this must be accepted by Socialists. However, when we say that the spread of education and the elimination of regional differences have been made in Yugoslavia we do not attribute these to Socialism, but to Capitalism.

Yugoslavia is still largely an agricultural country as about 50 per cent. of the population work on the land. Capitalist development, however, continues to break up the old village economy. This is not without its problems. As capitalism develops, the young from the countryside move to the towns seeking jobs. But the jobs are not always there. Hence unemployment, which is currently a problem in Yugoslavia despite the fact that the new constitution guarantees “the right to work and the freedom to work.” In 1962 the unemployed numbered 236,000 (7 per cent.); others seeks work in West Germany. (See Table.)

Yugoslavia has the same percentage of the population at work in agriculture as Russia, but in some ways is ahead, particularly in the development of the free market. Up till 1950 the Yugoslav economy was run on the same lines as is the Russian today. The state fixed the quantity and quality of the goods of each enterprise, who should supply the raw materials and at what prices, the prices of the products and their buyers, etc. This type of state capitalism is resorted to in times of extreme shortage or of national effort as for war or of rapid industrialisation. However, if too prolonged, it tends to become inefficient. This is being discovered in Russia today.

Yugoslavia began decentralisation in 1950. This took the form of developing a free market. Not completely free, but with the state only intervening to set general targets—the system which exists in some developed countries of West Europe in fact.

“Workers’ control” was introduced at the same time as the ending of the state-directed economy. Indeed, it was part of the same process. The importance of “workers' control” in Yugoslavia lies not in its formal arrangements but in its economic role. It was introduced as part of a plan to make Yugoslav capitalist industry more efficient. Its function was and still is to provide an incentive for workers to work harder. The workers’ councils play a similar role to co-partnership schemes in this and other countries. Many students of the Yugoslav system overlook this efficiency aspect and talk enthusiastically about economic democracy. This is a serious mistake as it misses the very reason why the workers’ councils were set up.

Capitalist industries if they are to survive must become more and more efficient. Time-work and equal wages do not provide a sufficient incentive to work hard. Hence piecework, profit-sharing, bonuses, co-partnership and various other incentive schemes. In Yugoslavia the equivalent is the rigid implementation of the principle of distribution according to work. This principle is adhered to strictly and any departure from it is condemned as “non-Socialist.” The workers councils have some say in deciding how the income of the enterprise in which they work should be distributed—but they must share it in accordance with the principle of distribution according to work done. The harder a worker works the more he gets. Herein lies the incentive. Tito has specifically said that this principle is the best way “of thwarting tendencies towards a levelling out of earnings, and other negative manifestations.” The plain fact of the matter is that equal wages would be bad for productivity.

Of course, the rulers deny that the workers’ councils are only a method of increasing productivity. They talk about "the liberation of human labour” and the like. All this is so much nonsense and it is surprising that many of those who are not taken in when supporters of co-partnership in this country refer to their plan as “a possible advance in civilisation” are deceived when the Yugoslav rulers do the same.

Under capitalism the workers must strive to obtain as high standard of living as possible. The experience of the workers’ councils in Yugoslavia shows that these councils are no substitute for free trade unions. Certainly their formal institution is unobjectionable. The workers in an enterprise elect a Council which is ultimately responsible for the general running of the enterprise. The Council in its turn elects a Managing Board. The Director who is responsible for the day-to-day running of the enterprise is appointed by a joint commission of the Workers’ Council and the local administration concerned. In this light the workers’ councils must be seen as the counterparts of joint production councils and such other frauds in the West.

The working class in Yugoslavia has no free trade unions and the workers’ councils are no substitute. For should the workers decide to use the councils to increase their incomes without a corresponding increase in productivity the government trade unions step in denouncing, in the words of one of their leaders, the “small-owner mentality" and other ”backward” influences which make the workers think of exerting "a stronger pressure on the increase of personal incomes." The principle of no pay rise unless there is an increase in productivity, which our own rulers are trying to impose on us. is rigidly implemented in Yugoslavia.

In time the working class in Yugoslavia must come to realise its class position and will take steps to end it. Unfortunately this seems a long way off yet. What is important at the moment is that workers outside Yugoslavia should not be deceived by its Socialist pretensions. Yugoslavia is not a Socialist country. The working class there are still exploited for the purpose of capital accumulation. Those in charge of this accumulation are the ruling class. Let this be understood.

Adam Buick

The Passing Show: The Lady and the Tramp . . . and all that (1966)

The Passing Show Column from the August 1966 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Lady and the Tramp . . . and all that

Ryde on the Isle of Wight on one of the many disappointingly wet and blustery days of an English summer. Holidaymakers sit disconsolately in the numerous Egg and Chip cafes, or gaze gloomily from the seedy seafront shelters at the unfriendly grey sky, bored stiff.

But there is one man who seems quite indifferent to the weather or to the unfriendly stares of some, who no doubt resent the smell that clings about him. He is a tramp, a caricature of a human being, with a mane of iron-grey hair and big blue eyes, whose battered clothes are secured about him with strips of tape and lumps of coarse string. There on a low wall he sits in the open, doggedly reading an old copy of The Times.

In a pub that evening, a brassy haired woman expresses her disgust at the mere existence of such people, and listening to the talk, you learn that this one is always on the island, wandering from place to place throughout the year. Unlike many tramps, though, he is by no means penniless because (or so the story goes) his family pay him enough money to keep him out of their way.

But what the lady in the pub overlooks is that there are a few thousand like him in Great Britain alone (and the number is growing) and she probably never stops to ask herself why this is so. Perhaps she feels that he is an affront to her meagre dignity, or perhaps he is an uncomfortable reminder of the loneliness that is always stalking in the background for all of us under capitalism, so that no one knows just when it will engulf him.

Tramps, it has been said, are what they are because they cannot face the harsh realities of everyday life in the modern world. So they take to the road and go on the run from it all, rarely staying long in one place, alone with their rags and their thoughts, objects of a mixed pity, fear and resentment from the population in general, and condescension from the “do gooders" in particular.

There’s certainly something to be said for such a theory, though of course it does not go far enough, and misses out a very important fact. Our man in Ryde notwithstanding, the mass of tramps are very poor—a lot of them from the very lowest income groups in the working class—and it is one of the big factors which makes them turn and run. For them, loneliness is not new by the time they start their wanderings, and in many cases it is a choice of near-destitutions, static or mobile. To sleep under a hedge with newspapers for bedclothes, or alone in a damp and dingy room with crumbling walls and vermin for company— and the worry of finding next week’s rent. The loneliness of their lives is theirs in ample measure, of course, but as one vagrant said to a survey interviewer, “it’s not so bail when you're out in the open . . . Four walls bring it home to you . . .” 

But don’t go making the mistake that loneliness is for tramps only. It is fast becoming a really big problem of the sixties. Armand Georgés in a little booklet Modern Loneliness has estimated that there are over four million lonely people in Britain and it is a terrible fact that it affects all age groups, from children to “senior citizens”.

This booklet is not a very satisfactory work and barely skims over the problem, but it does at least touch on the causes, such as: —

The uniformity of council house estates . . . the demands of work and economic difficulties produce a feeling of boredom and boredom is the first symptom of the the disease . . . 

Seventy years of age, he lived in digs. When he became ill he went into hospital, but although he recovered he still remains there because his landlady will not take him back. She has let his room . . .

Mr. Georgés admits that loneliness “cannot penetrate useful work and emotional stability" but further than this he doesn’t go, perhaps because he is vaguely aware of the difficulty of attaining these conditions in the world of today. So he contents himself with suggestions of more clubs, meeting places, etc., and a government “ministry for the aged".

So let us say what we think of the problem. Loneliness, boredom and emotional strains are a product of private property society, and modern capitalism has brought them to a terrifying pitch. It has been said that we are all on our own in capitalism and it is not difficult to see why. In such a set-up, we are all thrown into ceaseless competition with each other so that satisfactory contact between human beings is a rarity.

The problem is accentuated in the big towns, of course, where the narrow and unfulfilling lives of workers is so much in evidence, like the couple above. And for those who are lonely, the very bigness of the towns, crammed to capacity with other humans (mainly workers) though they are, restricts their chances of ever belonging anywhere. It is a poverty in human friendship and contact, a direct result of poverty in the means of life from which most or us suffer.

Sing something simple

An old copy of the Gibraltar Chronicle dropped out of a file the other day and promptly found its way into my pocket. It's dated Nov. 9th, 1949 and what do you think appears on the front page? Well, among other things is a bold headline: “T.U.C. leaders will fully support Govt’s policy". There follows a report of the T.U.C.’s decision in London “after seven weeks of anxious discussion” to “give full support to the Labour Government’s policy of greater production at less cost". This, by the way, was after the devaluation of Sterling—with its effect of price increases—yet still the T.U.C. was prepared to recommend an "even greater effort to keep demands for higher wages under restraint . . .”

Well, it's old news now. but it does us no harm to look back a few years and see the similarity between ideas then and now. The T.U.C. seems to have learned precious little in the past seventeen years, if a statement by their general secretary George Woodcock is any guide:

If in the early days you can emphasise increased productivity or prices or social justice as the main objectives, you are just kidding yourself. You can, as we are doing, get some degree of incomes restraint, rough and ready and unscientific though it is. You can expect to do that quickly. The other things will take time.

Did 1 say that little had been learnt? If a minus quantity, of knowledge were possible, Mr. Woodcock and the T.U.C. would certainly have it.

Bigger and better bedbugs

When we were kids my parents waged a long and largely futile battle against bedbugs in our poky terraced house in London. Fumigation, creosote, and even blow-lamps all had a temporary effect only, and there they were as thick as ever in a week or two. Wc got rid of them eventually because for some months during the blitz, we didn't use the bedrooms. I suppose they all died of starvation, or went looking elsewhere.

Now what do you think of a Guardian report of June 6th? The U.S. is planning to use bedbugs against the Vietcong. But these will be specially bred for the purpose and won’t be starved to death so easily. Just look at this revolting account.

". . . Plans are based on the fad that bedbugs scream with excitement at the prospect of feeding on human flesh. So what Mr. McNamara's whizz-kids are up to is trying to produce a sound amplification system which would enable the G.l. . . . to hear the anticipatory squeals of a captive bedbug as it detects the Vietcong lying in ambush ahead . . . A large and hungry bedbug will . . . register the presence of a man some 200 yards to its front or side while ignoring the person carrying it in a special capsule".

When we have pointed to the brutality and degradation of capitalism’s wars, understandably we have tended to stress the bigger horrors like nuclear bombs, but it is perhaps the so-called smaller things like this which illustrate the depths to which men sink their dignity in the cause of the profit motive.

Gaspers

Comrade Mao Tse Tung is the greatest genius of our lime. Rarely has history seen such a revolutionary leader as Mao Tse Tung . . . (Peking People's Daily 15.6.66). '

There is not and never was a man in the world of so varied, so rich, so fruitful and so omnipresent a genius . . . (Tribute to Stalin, by Moscow Radio. May Day 1951),

Mr. Robinson said . . . he would prefer a bigger building programme for the (hospital) service . . . but the amount of money available had to depend on the economic progress of the country. (Guardian 25.6.66).

The very idea of auto sales and auto profits has been built on a pile of corpses. (Ralph Nader, author of Unsafe At Any Speed, Guardian report 15.6.66).

In the foreseeable future, the only alternative future to an incomes policy is higher unemployment. (Guardian editorial 5.7.66).

I have never fell humiliated (T .U.C. General Secretary George Woodcock 5.7.66).

Eddie Critchfield

Death (in prison) of a guerrilla (2021)

From the November 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

In September the ex-Maoist guerrilla leader Abimael Guzman died in a prison in Peru where he had been for nearly thirty years. He has been portrayed by the Peruvian and world press as one of the most criminal and brutal ‘Marxist’ leaders in the world, blamed for the death of more than 80,000 people and the destruction of private and government property

He was the founder of ‘Gonzalo Thought’ (after ‘Mao Zedong Thought’) and he created his own cult of personality, seeing himself as one of the ‘four swords’ of Marxism, after Marx, Lenin and Mao. He travelled to China in 1966 and 1967 during the Cultural Revolution and was part of a split from the Communist Party of Peru (Red Flag). Mao’s Little Red Book became his Bible. When he returned to Peru, he formed a guerrilla group called Shining Path with some of his professors and young students who came from peasant families,

The name Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso) was taken from José Carlos Mariategui, a Peruvian Marxist-Leninist who had founded Peru’s first Communist Party in 1928 and who advocated a peasant/indigenous people’s ‘socialism’. His maxim was: ‘El Marxismo-Leninismo abrirá el sendero luminoso hacia la revolución’ (‘Marxism-Leninism will open the shining path to revolution’). Many political movements were inspired by his writings including the Tupamaros in Uruguay and Evo Morales’ indigenous peoples’ movement in Bolivia. Three ex-leaders of these guerrilla movements later became presidents in Latin Americas and allies of the ruling class and the corporations.

Was Guzman really a communist? Was he a Marxist? Were Mao and Lenin genuine Marxists and socialists? Are Leninism and Maoism valid socialist/communist currents? Can the crimes that were committed by Guzman and Shining Path be blamed on Marxism and socialism?

The Socialist Party and the World Socialist Movement have said for decades that Leninism, Stalinism and Maoism have never been Marxist or socialist conceptions; that, instead, they were representative of an economical current described by Engels as State Capitalism; that the concept of a violent uprising was a tactic created by Lenin and the Bolsheviks to overthrow the government of Russia, an idea borrowed from the French Blanquists. It was not a Marxist conception. Shining Path’s first action was to attack a polling station and burn it down, in defiance of Marx’s insistence on the political education of the working class, the revolutionary use of the ballot, and universal suffrage among the working class.

In Latin America Maoism was a complete failure from the first, having been adopted by several organisations that had abandoned Castroism. It sacrificed the lives of many young people who became members of the urban guerrillas and infiltrated themselves into workers’ unions, or went to the mountains or jungles of several countries in Latin America and were assassinated by the police or the armed forces, along with many peasants and members of the workers’ unions, university teachers, and young professionals.

Maoism’s failure in Latin America is a clear indication that a minority group of individuals will not liberate the working class and humanity. It suggests that Marx was correct when he wrote that only the working class can liberate itself. Maoism was a tactic, earlier criticised by Engels, of a conscious minority acting in the name of an unconscious majority. But socialism cannot be established without a class-conscious working class

Mao Zedong Thought attracted many young people in different countries in Latin America including the Caribbean islands as an ideological replacement for Castroism, but in essence it was the same adventurist programme advocated by Regis Debray who had been in Bolivia with Che Guevara. The main attraction was the concept of ‘anti-revisionism’ started by China and Albania against the ‘Khruschevites’. It claimed to be a restoration of true socialism and true Marxism, but it was just a variety of Leninism and Stalinism. Maoism was Chinese nationalism, just as Castroism was Latin American nationalism.

Latin American Maoism was basically a nationalist/patriotic movement, and all the so-called Communist parties that were created were nationalist parties of the countries where they were formed. None of them had a socialist programme; their programme was for reforms, statism and the nationalisation of natural resources.

It was mainly a movement among young people and university students. It never had any support among the industrial working class. Although many Marxist-Leninist parties sent their best cadres to work with the peasants, it never became a peasants’ movement; it was capitalist governments that provided the peasants with what they wanted – land reform, agricultural equipment and supplies. They confronted a force which was stronger than them, the forces of the capitalist state, and suffered the consequences.

When China openly opted for state-run capitalism and collaboration with Western powers and Western corporations, all these organisations collapsed and disbanded themselves. Some of their leaders were killed or deported; others later became government ministers. The USA wanted them to leave and provided visas for them to emigrate, but they were no threat to capital and to capitalist society; they were anti-imperialists, but they were not anti-capitalists.

The new government of Peru refused to bury Abimael Guzman’s body, citing so-called national security. So his body was cremated and the ashes scattered at a secret location. Maoism and Shining Path are no longer popular within any section of Peruvian society nor a threat to security. At first they had some support within the peasant class, but then the peasants were caught in the cross-fire between the Maoist guerrilla fighters and the government’s armed forces and many were killed. Maoism is a dead movement in Peru today. Most of the members of Guzman’s group became part of some gang or drug trafficking.

Many of the deaths blamed on Shining Path and Guzman were not committed by them. The police, the paramilitary and the armed forces should be blamed for most of the killings, like most of the killing committed in Colombia in the fight with the Maoist/Castroist guerrillas known as the FARC – another group which is not socialist or Marxist, as the media alleged. Being connected to and armed by Cuba does not make a group socialist. Nor were the Tupamaros in Uruguay a socialist or Marxist movement (one of their ex-leaders later became president) but were more like a Robin Hood movement, taking money from the rich to give to the poor.

Maoism in Latin America showed its terrorist and anti-working-class nature, and was a total negation of the revolutionary nature of Marxism and socialism. It was only the capitalist press and the anti-communists who labelled Guzman and those like him ‘Marxist’, just as they did with FARC.

Maoism could not have been applied in developed capitalist countries like the USA, Britain, or Germany. It was basically a theory for a peasants’ movement, similar to the Russian anti-Tsarist Narodniks who, similarly, had no support among the peasants and ended up using terrorist tactics. It could only be applied in Third World countries, but even so was a complete failure in all the economically backward countries where it attempted to take control of the nation and the state apparatus. It turned out not to be a shining path to anywhere.

Marcos

George Galloway: would-be Populist Leader (2021)

From the August 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

On the day the results of the recent Batley and Spen by-election were announced a Labour Party supporter responded to a comment about the meagre majority achieved. He was insistent that the 323-vote margin would have been 8,000+ higher had it not been for the appearance of George Galloway for the Workers Party of Britain.

From a purely psephological point of view the Galloway performance was remarkable for a representative of a small, leftish party. Nearly 22 percent of the vote secured a comfortable third place, a good 7,000 votes ahead of the Liberal Democrat, 5,000 or so behind the winner.

So perhaps the disgruntled Labour supporter had a point, except, of course, there is a large presumption involved. There is no way of determining whether an absence of Galloway and his new party would have resulted in in his 8,000 votes defaulting to Labour. Indeed, the experience of the previous by-election in Hartlepool suggests the Conservative candidate might have been a beneficiary too, especially given Galloway’s pro-Brexit stance.

There is a strong suggestion that Galloway profited from an alienated Muslim vote who may have perceived themselves as being tainted by Labour’s broad brush anti-Semitism accusations levelled at almost any anti-Zionist or pro-Palestinian. It must be galling for a community more often the target of racism to feel themselves viewed as racists by the party they traditionally supported.

There is surely little doubt that the impressive vote was for Galloway personally rather than being an ideological breakthrough by the Workers Party of Britain. He has a background of championing anti-Zionism and favouring Islamic causes. There have even been suggestions that he converted from Roman Catholicism to Islam, although he has denied this.

The Workers Party of Britain appears to be a left-wing manifestation of that recent political phenomenon, populism. On its website the Party states it is a response to a need following the defeat of Corbynism. It believes:

• The importance of a planned economy directing the role of the state.
• Free-market fundamentalism has gutted British industry, castrated society and destabilised the working class.
• The state should guide economic life.
• The working class needs to be united on shared class interests to struggle for socialism.
• Countries that have tried to build the socialist new world include the USSR, China, Cuba et al.
• Brexit is a positive move to secure Britain’s independence to pursue fiscal and monetary policies and take key utilities and transport into public ownership.

There is ‘A ten-point programme for workers’ promoted on the Party’s website that sits easily with left-Labour aspirations. It has garnered the support of the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist), which situates itself in the tradition of Stalinism and Maoism. Indeed, Galloway’s deputy leader Joti Brar is from a family closely associated with the CPGB (ML). For the Workers Party of Britain the problem is free-market capitalism, the solution… state capitalism.

Galloway has been here before of course. In 2005 he did even better, winning the Bethnal Green and Bow constituency for Respect, a political grouping backed on that occasion by the Socialist Workers Party. A parting of the ways quickly followed and it would seem he has moved from the neo-Trotskyist camp to the neo-Stalinist one. Either way, the prospects for democracy would be dim should such a grouping ever succeed.

Is it a party at all, or a Galloway supporters’ club? It seems highly unlikely that some John or Joan Smith standing for the Workers Party of Britain in Batley and Spen would have garnered anything close to 8,000 votes and their performances elsewhere have been derisory.

Personality politics blurs the line between those who’d style themselves left or right wing. Thus George Galloway was quite sanguine about sharing a platform at a Brexit rally with Nigel Farage. The public moment being far more crucial than principles.

The charismatic leader, or a leader who thinks himself charismatic, becomes all important. A previous attempt to displace Labour as the party of the working class in Yorkshire was the now less than marginal Socialist Labour Party led by Arthur Scargill who tried to politically exploit the prominence he gained from the 1984/85 miners’ strike. Indeed, the CPGB (M-L) was a split from it.

What these parties have in common is being political cul-de-sacs. Setting aside implications of serious democratic deficit in its politics, should the Workers Party actually succeed in displacing the Labour Party nothing much would change for the working class.

With Galloway as prime minister implementing his 10-point plan the workers would still be working for wages that represent only a portion of the value their labour power creates. After all, ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’ has successfully created numerous billionaires while the working masses most definitely do not have control of the means of production and distribution.

In other words, the Workers Party in power would replace capitalism with capitalism, and a less successful version of capitalism if some the models quoted on the Party’s website are anything to go by.

The Batley and Spen by-election is a demonstration that there are no answers to the problems created by capitalism for the working class in any of the parties on offer, major or minor, left wing or right wing.

Kim Leadbeater MP made the usual platitudinous vague promises to serve all the community, bring people together and further local interests. Had the Tory won he would have spouted an almost identical speech. Similarly, the LibDem. Galloway would undoubtedly have been more vocally belligerent, but it would have amounted to the same.

This is because community divisions, Brexit, economic decline and the plethora of other problems are rooted in capitalism. The dreadful murder of Kim Leadbeater’s sister Jo Cox, the then sitting MP, was an extreme example of politics under capitalism. It is a system wasteful of human lives that is immune to political point scoring.

The Labour Party supporter decrying George Galloway for undermining the Leadbeater vote remains politically blind, as presently all too many are. There are no short cuts, no inspired leaders, no previous models to draw on. Only a majority recognition of the need for a system of common ownership of economic means, moneyless and cooperative – socialism – can address those problems people have in common, even as they seem to be divided.

Until popular delusions can be effectively dispersed the people of Batley and Spen and everywhere else in the world will continue to labour for the pecuniary benefit of the capitalist few.

Dave Alton